Thread by @LarryAttree

🧵Today's my last day after almost 18 years at @Saferworld. I helped make the @war_pod series 'Reckoning with 9/11' to share what I've learned 9/11's global impact on peace and rights. Listen here:
saferworld.org.uk/multimedia/war…
Or spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/0SuO4t…

Hopefully it's useful whether you know a little or a lot about the Global War on Terror. Here are some of the key things we cover, and why they matter…

In episode 1, we describe how the unprecedented attacks - which remain the most deadly act in the history of terrorism - astonished the US and the world
saferworld.org.uk/multimedia/war…

The trauma - and public appetite for protection, justice and revenge - fed into an environment offering overwhelming support for Bush's response, the immediate launch of a global war on terrorism c-span.org/video/?166196-…

Much of the fallout in Afghanistan this summer stems from Bush and Rumsfeld's early decisions. This 'fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom', was made into a war of massive scope: good versus evil, with all countries 'with us or against us'

For America, the first question to other governments was no longer ‘do you support democracy?’, but ‘do you oppose terrorism?’ with enormous implications for stability and freedom across the world

Globally, as @SophieAuc (author of 'Proscribing Peace') told us, the UN rapidly passed Resolution 1373 - putting rebel groups onto terror blacklists, handing governments a stick to beat rebel groups with, and proscribing mediated conflict resolution manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526157591/

This also started the UN's uncomfortable embrace of counter-terrorism - something that threatens to undermine the institution's charter today

https://twitter.com/jordan_street07/status/1442824889572990977?s=20

On Sept 20 2011 Bush also levelled an ultimatum to the Taliban, triggering the US & NATO war in Afghanistan, the subject of episode 2, 'Into the land of bones', explored with Pulitzer prize winner @SteveCollNY and Afghan peace/justice expert @humasaeed78
saferworld.org.uk/multimedia/war…

It was strange to record this reflection as the Taliban swept through Afghanistan. It's important to recollect, as the GOP weaponise the fallout today against Biden, that it was Bush and Rumsfeld's mistakes that set the path inexorably towards failure

As @SteveCollNY explained, they eschewed several opportunities to settle with surrendered Taliban, failed to plan and invest in rebuilding Afghanistan, permitted 'dark and pervasive' abuses against a wide range of Afghans, allied with & failed to check the predation of warlords..

As @humasaeed78 described, this enabled deep corruption - and failure to pay starving soldiers or fund schools - that undermined Afghan state legitimacy and 'paved the way for the Taliban'. justsecurity.org/78252/the-fail…

Even by Obama's time, the war was hard to reboot. @SteveCollNY: 'The idea that rural COIN would win the hearts and minds of the Afghans seemed a fantasy right from the start, certainly to the soldiers on the ground... who actually went into the villages and saw the hostility'

On the afternoon of 9/11 itself, Rumsfeld dictated to an aide ‘We've got to see, somehow, how we could bring Saddam Hussein into this'. pbs.org/wgbh/pages/fro…

Distracted by Rumsfeld's drive to broaden of the war towards Iraq, CENTCOM fluffed the early chance to trap Bin Laden and Mullah Omar in Tora Bora

The focus on taking out Saddam also meant that Bush nixed an opportunity to capture Al Qaeda accolyte Abu Musab Al Zarqawi in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2002 - just one more reason why invading Iraq was the very worst error of the whole war on terror

Invading Iraq with no evidence of a Saddam-AQ link and based on unreliable intelligence about WMD unleashed cataclysmic effects. The US and UK diminished their global standing and generated intense anger among all those appalled by the violence and destruction of Iraq

We unpack this with surge commander Gen Odierno's adviser @JacksonYale's Emma Sky and @CH_MENAP's @renadmansour in episode 3 'Overreach in Iraq'. saferworld.org.uk/multimedia/war…

After a rapid military victory, the Coalition again failed to reconstruct Iraq. They didn't deliver basic security or services. As @renadmansour explained, under deBaathification and the disbandment of Iraqi security forces, 'What you had was wholesale destruction of the state'.

Thus the invasion created an environment for Zarqawi's Al Qaeda in Iraq to embark on 'The Management of Savagery' - a horrific campaign of violence that put the occupiers into bunkers and fomented sectarian civil war

By 2006 there were 140 attacks a day. But the US and others clawed back in Iraq: Petraeus' COIN strategy to ally with reconcilable groups, focus on lessening civilian casualties, protect the population, and offer Iraqis more dignity and justice improved the offer to Iraqi people

Violence went down, but the US fatally failed to support democracy and push further to reject sectarian, strongman rule by ushering Nouri al-Maliki from power after his defeat in the 2010 elections. His sectarian and corrupt rule paved the way for the rise of ISIS.

Despite ISIS's defeat, Iraq is still reeling from this war against terror and for freedom. For @renadmansour the 'sectarianism, the emphasis on identity in politics' that emerged after 2003 remains the 'number one grievance' for Iraqis today. justsecurity.org/78346/iraqi-el…

If the Iraq and Afghanistan failures are somewhat well understood, this is less true of the war on terror's impacts in Yemen and Somalia, which we discuss with @mary_harper @ionacraig @AwfaAnnami @afyare_elmi in Episode 4 saferworld.org.uk/multimedia/war…

In Somalia @afyare_elmi reminds us that US backing for warlords to hunt terrorists undermined the Somali state and unleashed a backlash that brought the Union of Islamic Courts to the fore

With US support, Ethiopia invaded Somalia to oust the UIC, and the backlash from this invasion precipitated a phase of unending war that’s still ongoing today

As in Iraq, a country initially hosting a mere handful of terror suspects became host to an AQ affiliate movement thousands strong – which as @mary_harper explains in her great book, is nowhere near defeat today
maryharper.co.uk/pages/book.html

Meanwhile in Yemen, as @AwfaAnnami and @ionacraig explain, US and UK support for corrupt, abusive and complicit ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh (shown here with Bush) benefitted Al Qaeda and helped destabilise Yemen – which remains one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises today

Wherever you looked, war on terror was going badly. To mitigate the harm leaders like Obama sought to sanitise the war – embracing remote warfare and countering violent extremism.

We discuss how this has been going with @CivCenter's @danmahanty @Abigail_Watson7 @jordan_street07 @Spaces4Change's @VictoriaOhaeri and @InterpeaceTweet's @Simpson_YPS in episode 5 saferworld.org.uk/multimedia/war…

Despite efforts to sanitise the war, counter-terror remains a great rallying cry for the world’s nations, and this has enabled countless elites to use war on terror to enrich themselves and consolidate power, often with international backing

We explore examples of governments ‘Weaponising the war on terror’ in episode 6 – looking at the implications of this in the #Philippines, #Egypt and #Syria with @marcbbatac and @Rim_Turkmani saferworld.org.uk/multimedia/war…

In 2010 48% of the world’s people lived in autocracies - by 2020 this figure was 68%. Many factors have contributed, but as all the country case studies @Saferworld and others have produced since 2014, war on terror has played a big part in this shift.

But the US and its friends didn’t just undermine freedom in poor, unstable countries – they also did huge damage at home, as we explore in episode 7 ‘Bringing it all back home’, with @attackerman and @HinaShamsi...
saferworld.org.uk/multimedia/war…

Although @HinaShamsi brilliantly conveys the erosion of civil liberties and the targeting of Muslim communities and @attackerman is electrifying on mass surveillance and militarisation of US policing...

... we just couldn't pack in the full domestic impacts of the war on terror in the US. In this pic you can see my show notes on @attackerman’s brilliant book ‘Reign of terror’, which is a devastating must-read on all this penguinrandomhouse.com/books/622555/r…

We also hear from @Josef_Braml how most of the world’s wealthiest countries followed the US lead in adopting laws that restricted freedoms after 9/11. See the excellent @FESonline study ny.fes.de/article/anti-t…

For example, 80 new security laws were enacted in Australia between 2001 and 2019, and France had a state of emergency in place for two full years.

Many new laws were emergency measures, but they’ve largely stayed in place. As @Josef_Braml says: ‘be careful and do not squeeze all the toothpaste out of the tube, because you won't get it back in again’

Taking stock of the impacts profiled in the series, we are looking back on a war, or a series of interrelated wars, that touched over 85 countries

We don't know how many people were killed, but @BrownUniversity figures plus minimums for Somalia suggest to me at least 925,000, including at least 360,000 civilians - more than 100 times the number of civilians killed on 9/11

There are, according to Bruce Hoffmann, four times as many groups today designated by the State Department as terrorist organizations as there were on 9/11. icct.nl/publication/co…

Key war on terror battlegrounds remain locked in war or are struggling to remain peaceful. The democratic gains of the post Cold War era have been wiped out. The standing of Western powers has been tarnished.

The global war on terror has also absorbed an insane amount of resources ($8 trillion by the US alone through end 2022), plunging the US deeper into debt while sucking resources away from issues that pose a much greater threat to life and well being than terrorism

As the 'Reckoning with 9/11' series shows, this war had overbroad objectives, was launched to defend principles that were abandoned from the outset, whose violence and inequity has precipitated massive, ongoing blowback

It was built on fatally misunderstanding the games being played by both enemies and 'allies', the failure to know or care how people affected would feel about their victimhood in its wake, and systematic failure to reflect on impacts and adapt accordingly

Yet despite these results, mainstream commemorations of 9/11’s 20th anniversary platformed and venerated war on terror leaders like Bush, Blair and their ilk

After the Afghan debacle, it has been truly bizarre to hear politicians in the UK House of Commons, analysts etc claim this war should have been fought harder, with more training and equipment – in short, that we need to keep doubling down

https://twitter.com/LarryAttree/status/1434253115931430912?s=20

Embrace of counter terrorism, remote warfare, draconian laws remains strong; European interventions in the Sahel today display little sign of learning from mistakes saferworld.org.uk/resources/publ…

So the final episode 'Is the 9/11 paradigm here to stay?' asks former MI5 counter terror officer @tdgparker, scholar/author @brooks_rosa and Special Rapporteur/Prof @NiAolainF: why is the 9/11 paradigm still so powerfully entrenched? Can we move on? saferworld.org.uk/multimedia/war…

There are 3 reasons to think not
1. As @tdgparker points out, in history democracies have fallen into the trap set by terrorists (damaging their cause and creating more enemies by overreacting) pretty much every single time. If there's another 9/11, we're back where we started

2. As @NiAolainF explains, today's global counter-terror architecture is sprawling uncontrollably into laws, regional bodies and institutions that are too powerful and way out of control

3. As @brooks_rosa observes, 'the bureaucracy expands to meet the expanding needs of the buraeucracy': CT bodies and contractors will keep on trucking under a momentum that is hard to check

But, as @delinagoxho and I conclude, there ARE reasons to be optimistic:
1. Young people are tired of being seen as a threat and are, frankly, done with racist and patriarchal law enforcement and control. Just maybe, the future belongs to them.

2. Politicians with the conviction to affirm that Bush & Blair's vision has been lethal to peace and democracy can challenge the 9/11 paradigm and win. There is massive public backing for policies that support peace. See @CRbuildpeace: c-r.org/resource/publi…

3. War on terror has failed so visibly on its own terms that at some point our leaders, officials and media will simply not be able to get away with presenting a broken model as the antidote to our fears.

At such a moment of Reckoning, a new security paradigm will be possible, and the world could be much better for it.

Before ending, let me thank @delinagoxho @jordan_street07 @Abigail_Watson7 @SaferParker @JasonCalder15 plus sponsors @fesnewyork @OpenSociety @jrct_uk and all our amazing guests for making this series possible

All of us involved hope you like the series - if you do, please big it up... but if not, gentle feedback always welcome!